Typography meets poetry at a Pink Floyd laser-light show In Surface
Tension, poetry is liquefied. Flowing away from meaning, letters
and words gather and pool into puddles of poetry; street signs and
logos reflected in the oily sheen of polluted gutters of rainwater.
Like a funhouse mirror reflecting the language that surrounds us,
the pages drip over the margins, suggesting that Madge was right,
we are "soaking in it!" Surface Tension updates visual poetry for
our post-pandemic age, asking us rethink the verbiage around us, to
imagine letters as images instead of text, to find meaning in their
beautiful shapes as Beaulieu stretches, torques, slides, blurs, and
melts them into Dali-esque collages. "The striking compositions
you'll find in Surface Tension are being presented sequentially in
book form, yet that they wouldn't be out of place hanging on the
wall goes without saying. Beaulieu swerves Gomringer when writing
that 'Readibility is the key: like a logo, a poem should be
instantly recognizable...' yet, to this reader, these works merit
sustained and enthusiastic viewing precisely because they teeter on
the edge of legibility. The kinetic, glitchy quality of their
'alphabetic strangeness' keeps them unrecognizable as poems and,
here, 'that is poetry as I need it,' to quote Cage. Think of them
as anti-advertisings selling you nothing but bountiful
manifestations of the irreducible plasticity of numbers,
punctuation marks, and letter forms. No logos." - Monica de la
Torre, Madelon Leventhal Rand Endowed Chair in Literature, Brooklyn
College; co-editor of Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979 "With his
distinctive visual palindromes and angled axes of symmetry, Derek
Beaulieu has developed a signature mastery of Letraset, leveraging
the twentieth-century technology as a vehicle for bring concrete
poetry into the twenty-first century. With Surface Tension,
Beaulieu takes the possibilities of that new idiom even further,
unsettling the fixity his symmetries once reinforced and dislodging
the set in Letraset as poems distort in fun-house-mirror swerves,
sag as if under their own weight, pool and smear in the liquid
logic of heated ink, or swoop and blur as if in motion. In the
process, these poems make visible the filmic potential of the
photocopier, the facture of abraded transfers from brittling stock,
and the three-dimensional substrate of the page with its flexible
bends in curving space. These are thus poems in part about their
own modes of production. They are beautiful products of a
self-aware and intelligent process." - Craig Dworkin, author of
Radium of the Word: A Poetics of Materiality "'When most of the
language we consume is non-poetic, should poetry not attempt to
poetically intervene within these spaces that are not traditionally
poetic?' The answer to Derek Beaulieu's question, put forward in
his beautiful essay, is surely yes: the ten brilliantly adventurous
visual poems in his Surface Tension make a startling case for his
fascinating Letraset/photocopier inventions. Beaulieu's
compositions originate in a place of clean design and logical
narrative; soon, as in a dream, they open up, ushering in what he
calls 'a poetry of difference, chance, eruption.' Marcel Duchamp
would have called it the poetry of the infrathin: watch 'Simple
Symmetry' or 'Dendrochronology' open up and come alive in their
minutely evolving new spaces. This is quite simply an enchanting
book - a book producing new pleasures with each turn of the page."
- Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities,
Emerita, Stanford University
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